


The Last Deer in Nara

by katsumeragi



Category: Cyberpunk 2077 (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Dialogue Heavy, F/M, Kissing, basically only T for language and mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-15
Updated: 2021-02-15
Packaged: 2021-03-16 10:53:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29452614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katsumeragi/pseuds/katsumeragi
Summary: Sharing some rice at the end of the world
Relationships: Goro Takemura/Female V
Comments: 1
Kudos: 34





	The Last Deer in Nara

V knocked four times, and he knew no one else would be at the door except her.

It took a lot of digging, but considering she was deep in the pockets of every fixer in town it didn’t take a lot for V to find information on where Takemura was holing up before their last stand. Johnny pressed her to tie up any loose ends, give any kisses goodbye, or slobber the last knob (his words, definitely not hers.) Sure, she had a few...relations while her biological ticking time bomb was counting down but the one person she wanted to see in person was tight-lipped on his location. 

V knew he liked having their meetups amongst crowds at busy hawker markets and wondered if that’s why he chose the No Tell Motel, a revolving door of dolls and horndogs.

After a long pause Takemura opened the door to his motel room nervously and with a furrowed brow, glancing side to side and even behind her. “I thought we had agreed to not contact each other until we carried out Hanako’s plan.”

V folded her arms. “And I thought by now you realized that I listen to you as well as you know how to use a smartphone.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and opened the door further. “Hurry in.”

She tried her best to stifle a wheeze at his room, plastered with garish animal prints, refulgent blue and pink lighting and the sequined beaded curtain to the bathroom. The only difference from a normal room was the boards over the windows he must have hastily put up himself, but she was sure anyone hunting Takemura would never picture him somewhere this seedy. Hiding in plain sight, indeed.

“Nice digs you picked out, by the way. Have you made use of its features?” she asked with a glint in her eye.

Takemura rolled his own. “Love hotels are nothing new to me. You think these sort of facilities are exclusive to Night City?”

“You don’t strike me as the ‘hit it and quit it’ type.”

“That is because I am not. But let’s just say members of the Arasaka family were.” He watched as she shuffled the trash at the foot of the bed with the toe of her boots. “I am afraid I do not have much to offer you to drink at the moment. Only tea and beers left over from the previous guests.” 

“Actually I haven’t eaten since we split up. Wouldn’t happen to have any leftovers, would you?”

“Rice, if that is good enough.” 

It was. V watched as he paddled some rice from a metal cylinder (it was too tall to be a pot, but realized he had fashioned a makeshift stove and pot out of some flamethrower parts and a muffler, which was charmingly ingenious) and sprinkled a few things on top. Takemura handed it to her in a chipped bowl with a plastic takeaway fork. “Do you think I’m too uncultured to hold chopsticks correctly?” she asked. He didn’t respond.

She took a bite and all the tension in her body melted into the zebra comforter.

“This whole time when you were complaining about food I thought you were just being picky, but you can do this? Who are you!” She all but vacuumed up the rest of it while the former bodyguard basked in her praise. “What did you do to it to make it not taste so mushy?”

“Mushy? Have you ever cooked rice?”

“Do you think I know how to cook and that my diet doesn’t consist of EezyBeef and whatever tequila brand Johnny forces my hand into drinking?” 

“I don’t overcook my rice, for one.”

“Then what’s this green stuff on top? Is that what fresh rice has on it?”

Takemura looked as if she insulted his grandmother. “It is called  _ furikake _ . It is a mix of seaweed with some seeds and dried fish, and lots of salt.”

“I already forgot how to say it correctly but this cock rice is the best thing I have ever put in my body.” 

Takemura sighed and sat next to her on bed’s edge. V rested her head on his shoulder, unsure if it went against his sense of duty and love of personal space. She laid her hands out, open palmed, one showing a smudge of blood she coughed up but didn’t properly clean off, in case it would guilt him into not moving her. She figured you can’t kick a choom while they’re already down.

“Tell me about some more ‘bakenekos.’”

V felt him slouch in defeat a little under her head. “I’m glad you get such amusement from butchering my native tongue.”

“Would I ever do that to you?”

“Let’s talk about  _ inugami _ this time. Much like the cat spirit, but for dogs.” V missed dogs a lot in their ever-changing world. She remembered seeing the last of them when she was about ten or eleven then they vanished like entire towns, next door neighbors, or average grocery stores.

“They are said to live under floorboards or in still water and possess those who are emotionally unstable, causing them to bite back like rabid dogs.”

“Can’t help but feel a little singled out by this demon, Takemura.”

“The world does not revolve around Night City, V, and especially not around you,” he replied, looking rather pleased with himself. “Okay, okay, if it helps, maybe we are both possessed by  _ onryo, _ spirits of the dead that remain in our world and seek vengeance.”

Ah, he meant Jackie. V treated Johnny being the uninvited guest in her body as a little white lie around Takemura. She knew if she did, she could kiss the idea of breaking into Arasaka goodbye. 

They sat in silence for a while, with car horns and a passerby’s boombox filling air, and the warmth between them feeling ever more present. 

“Do you remember what deer look like?” he asked. 

“Sorta. I think I’ve seen some in old cartoons and some paintings. Four little hoofed legs, and the stubby tail? Sorta like a...soft horse?”

“When Nara was destabilizing and the deer were dying off, the government saved the embryo from a dying mother, and raised it as the last deer of Japan. It lived in a small glass dome that you could take the train to see him, alongside the last fox and last wild boar.” V assumed a boar was similar to a pig, but perhaps meaner looking. She’d seen a fox on the side of a doll lounge and thought it was a type of hairy cat before Jackie corrected her. “When younger I was given an afternoon off from training at Arasaka to take a look but it felt...wrong. The deer looked so out of place in our world and not in habitable countryside. I sometimes feel like that animal.” V hummed at the story, commiserating with her rags to riches (and then back to rags) life becoming a corpo treated her. 

Johnny fizzled into the corner of the dingy room with an imaginary cigarette, since she would rarely indulge him. “Really, V? This guy’s spillin’ his fucking heart out to you and all you’re giving him is a ‘Hmmm?’” 

“Really Johnny?” she thought. “Maybe I’m trying to plan out how to do this.”

“Breaking fuckin’ news to me then.” He took a drag from his cigarette, with exaggerated puffs. “At least with that fucking cyclops cop you just let his muscles do the thinking. Or with Judy when you dove face first into her pus-”

“ _ Johnny _ .”

“Fine. Trust me, I need to get ready to tune out and not think about you using us to ride the dick of a corpo fossil.” With that he looked out the cracks in the boarded up window and faded away again. In a way, maybe Johnny was right and she shouldn’t have been overthinking it. 

Takemura pulled his hand away as if her modified hands gave him a shock. Had she been misreading their shared flustered glances, their oversharing, their concern for another?

“Do you not think, as someone old enough to have seen majestic animals die out to the last of its kind, that I am not an ancient relic, compared to you, V? Someone who is slowly running out of time?”

V scoffed. “Wouldn’t you say I’ve been running out of time ever since I locked the relic in my head?”

“It is not the same. You know what I mean.”

“Guess what? I went back through that flaming shithole apartment building to find you, and get you out of the shit. I could have found plenty of other people for my final moments, and instead I put my detective skills to work to find you. Nobody else. You.” V swung her leg over his lap to straddle him in one swift movement. She stared deeply into the white rings in his eyes, his faltering resolve, and twitching commissure. “Don’t you see what you do to me, Goro?”

His name rings in the air like TV static, and although she’s said his first name so informally before it never felt as venomous as it did in that moment. Takemura looked as if she stole his soul just by saying it. She should have expected any retaliation, but didn’t expect it was going to be a firm hand weaving into her hair as he pulled her in for a ravenous kiss. His lips were drying out from the Night City arid heat and his breath tasted like rice, cheap sake, and bitterness. He pulled away and his expression had a sorrowful certainty she wasn’t used to. Every muscle in V’s body throbbed in anticipation.

“Do you see who you force me to become, Valerie?”

She did. And she wanted a lot more of it.

  
  



End file.
